Red Scare - Propaganda w/ Mark Crispin Miller

Episode Date: December 27, 2020

The ladies talk to Mark Crispin Miller, the NYU professor suing his colleagues for libel over a classroom masking controversy, about covid heresy, academic freedom, conspiracy theories, Edward Bernays, and the changing face of propaganda in

We're back, we have a guest today, Mark Crispin Miller who is a professor of media studies at NYU. Thank you for being here with us, Mark. Well, thanks for having me on. I really appreciate it. Mark, you're the subject of a very interesting and for you frustrating case at NYU. You are suing, correct me if I'm wrong,

you're suing NYU, doing the faculty for? I'm specifically, I'm suing 19 of my department colleagues, maybe 20, I think 20, who signed a letter to the dean of my school, which is the Steinhardt School at NYU, demanding that he order a review of my conduct on the grounds that it's been egregious, and it's brutality, and lunacy. And I can give you the whole backstory,

because I think that's required for people to understand what they did and why I'm suing them. Yeah, that was my next question. Apparently you've been bullying and terrorizing the student body. That's me. Well, yeah, here's my story. I've been teaching this course on propaganda

for many years, at least 20 years. And that necessarily entails, in my view, grappling with propaganda drives that are ongoing at the time of the course, or very recent ones. Certainly, there's historical background. But whereas most professors who teach the subject tend to look back to the Nazis and the Bolsheviks, maybe World War I, maybe the Red Scare.

My view is that propaganda is an Anglo-American invention. It has been increasingly sophisticated and advanced over the century since its first huge manifestation in World War I, and has lately been astonishingly successful and powerful in many ways. So that the proper way to teach propaganda is to dig into the narratives that are in the air at the moment, which

can be very challenging. I make all this clear the first week of the class. In this particular semester, here we are all sitting in our homes, having the class by Zoom, which I hate, and which they hate. And I observed that we wouldn't even be here doing it this way if it weren't for the staggering power of the, we might call the COVID propaganda.

Whatever you think of that virus, and however seriously you take it, because propaganda need not be nefarious. I mean, a campaign to get you to wear your seatbelts is propaganda, right? Right, that's a good point. So the first week of this class, I adduced as an example of the kind of thing

that one might look at critically and closely is the mask mandates. If you're going to study propaganda, you have to make an effort to be impartial and thorough and as scholarly or scientific as possible. Therefore, I said to them, you would want to look at the eight randomized controlled studies of masks among health care professionals

over the last 15 years or so, although actually such studies have been conducted since the 40s. But there are eight fairly recent ones that have all found that masks are ineffective at blocking transmission of respiratory viruses for various reasons. I went on to say, you would also want to pay due attention to more recent studies that

find otherwise the claim that they do work. If you do that, I said, you'll want to look at scientific reviews of those studies, see what scientists say about them. And you'll also want to take note of the university where the studies were done and see if they have partnerships with Pfizer or see if they take money from the Gates Foundation.

And that's how you study propaganda, right? I said all this. And you'll face the paper trail, right? Of course. As opposed to just being battered by it as you're sitting in front of your laptop and your hairs on fire. I said, pointedly, I am not telling you not to wear masks. There's a rule in NYU.

It's very strict. I observe it myself. This is an intellectual exercise, all right? I said, oh, this is the first week. So this is around September? Yes, this is early September. And then a week or two later, a student asked to join the class.

And I said, sure, I mean, I always let students in. A Gallatin student, and as I told her and welcoming her, many of my best students had been Gallatin students. She joined the class. And I think the second day she was there, the subject came up again. So it was a resumption of the original discussion and abbreviated.

And I simply emphasized those eight studies. This was on a Thursday. And the next thing I knew early the next week, my department chair calls me up and asked me if I had told something like, if I had told the students not to wear masks or something like that, I said no. And then I explained what I had said. And he said, well, a student is tweeted.

She's very upset about what you said. Then later in the day, I started hearing from people I haven't heard from in years who were contacting me or my wife concerned what happened. And this is somebody, this is a tweeter with like 79 followers. And this wasn't just one tweet. It was a whole stream of tweets. It was kind of a tweet storm attacking me and demanding

that NYU fire me. That's what she demanded. Yeah. I looked briefly at this thread and she was talking about saying to the effect that you should be relieved of your duties, euphemistically and bureaucratically. I put it more bluntly.

This guy should be fired because I'm harmful to the students. And she hadn't said a word in the class, but she took to Twitter to make this demand. And so all these people started tweeting back. It's Twitter. So a lot of people attacked her. A lot of people attacked me. There were several media stories attacking me,

Gothamist, City and State, some student publication never called me or anything. A City and State called me one of the biggest losers of the week. So this was startling. Nothing like this has ever happened to me before. I've had students disagree in class. I welcome that.

Then we have a fruitful back and forth and it's illuminating. This was different. So that was odd and unpleasant, but the worst thing about it was that NYU essentially took her side. First, my chair tweeted his thanks to her and said, we as a department have made this a priority and are discussing next steps. OK, I don't know if I'm the most senior member

of the department, but I've been there since 97. And I am a member in any case and nobody from the department contacted me other than that one call from him. And here he is publicly thanking her for demanding that I be fired and promising to take action on it, which was really, you know, I was gobsmacked by this. Do you have a sense for how this obscure tweet from an obscure account mushroomed out of control?

That we can get into, OK. That's a bigger conversation. Let me finish because it doesn't stop there. The next day, the dean and there's a doctor who advises NYU on their COVID regulations, which are draconian. And the two of them emailed my other students directly without putting me on copy.

First of all, making a ritual not to academic freedom. They always do that. And then sort of hinting that I'd given them dangerous misinformation and providing a link to what they called authoritative studies from the CDC, which, if I had had a conversation with them, the senders, I would have pointed out that the CDC until early April echoed

the consensus of the studies that I had. Oh, not wearing masks, right? Dr. Fauci was on 60 minutes explicitly saying, you know, people shouldn't wear masks. Anyway, Oceania has always been at war with East Asia, right? It's whatever the propaganda says you believe. You don't have any historical memory. So they sent them these studies and basically instructed

them to believe those. It's the opposite of what I do. I don't tell them what to believe. And then it reminded them they have to wear their masks on campus as if I had said they shouldn't. Then my chair contacted me and pressed me to cancel my propaganda course for next semester, which is a course I've been teaching almost every semester.

And which is very well attended. Highly attended. The reviews, I'm not blowing my own horn. This is a fact. They're glowing. People have, and I can readily share the emails of support I've gotten from students saying that this course changed my life, blah, blah, blah.

Did students bring the email that you were not supposed to see it onto your attention? Is that how you found out about it? I think that's, yeah, one of them said, I think that's right. In any case, a student did send it to me when I asked her to. So I have it. So all this happened within the space of a few days, all right? And that's when I mounted my petition on change.org,

basically in defense of academic freedom and free speech, and not just on my own behalf. Because as the petition says, my battle here is a flashpoint in a much larger war on free speech that's been going on for decades, actually, against academics, journalists, and others, but that has lately become almost like a hot war. So my petition was a strong protest against that,

and merely urged that NYU respect my academic freedom. That's all it asked for. It started garnering signatures. To date, it has over 22,000. And very eminent people have signed it. Seymour Hirsch has signed it. James K. Galbraith, Bobby Kennedy, Jr., Oliver Stone, Chen Guangcheng,

the barefoot lawyer from China, he signed it. He had his own experience with NYU. And it's very gratifying, OK? Now, incensed a large group of my department colleagues, 25 of them, actually, to the point that they wrote a letter to the dean demanding an expedited review of my conduct on the grounds that I am a lunatic who forces his crackpot views

on his classes, doesn't tolerate disagreement, bullies students. They accuse me of explicit hate speech. That's a quote. Attacks on students and others in our community. That's a quote, OK? Including staff. What else?

Microaggressions. Right. Aggressions and microaggressions. It seems that microaggressions would pale in comparison to the fact that you have other denying Sandy Hook and bullying transgender students. Yes, yeah, right. No, you're absolutely right.

But they threw everything they could at me. Advocating for an unsafe learning environment and all this stuff. And they accused me of denying Sandy Hook took place on my website. They accused me of discouraging the class from masking. I mean, there are maybe 20 or more patently false charges against me.

And the dean went right ahead and ordered the review. He informed me. He'd gotten the letter. That's how I knew about it. I wrote to the provost and asked her, what should I do? I mean, I haven't even been consulted about this. She said, well, ask him for a meeting. So we met by Zoom.

And he was very vague and would only say, I mean, I made my case. I said, this letter is demonstrably false and defamatory. And there's no grounds for this. And he said that the university's lawyers had told him and the provost that they had to do it, which is problematic. I can get to that in a moment. So he did.

He ordered this review. And when I asked him what it would entail, he said, well, we'll talk to people. I said, well, what people? And he said, faculty and students. I said, no faculty have seen me teach. I mean, there's a few people I've taught courses with, but they're dead or no longer here.

So students. And he said, yes, we'll talk to students. I said, well, I'll have students contact you. I'm completely unafraid of their consensus on my teaching. I said, well, when will this end? And he said it'll end at the end of the semester, which, as of now, is a few weeks ago, right? And you still haven't heard.

I haven't heard a word. So I am suing those colleagues who sign the letter, except for the junior people. I'm not suing them. Because I figure whether they wanted to sign it or not, they must have felt obliged. So that's 19 of the 25 original. Yeah, it's either 19 or 20.

I think it's 20. Anyway, the complaint is this is the last thing I'll plug, is in my GoFundMe page, which I've set up to this morning. In fact, it went up. Well linked to it. OK. It went up a few days before Christmas. And all the documents are there.

My colleagues' letter and my point-by-point rebuttal, I should add, I sent them a rebuttal point-by-point and asked them for a retraction and an apology. And they ignored that. And then there was a follow-up email in which I asked them for a response by November 20, which was five days hence. And they ignored that.

So I figured I can't just take this. I mean, not only has it done me real harm, I mean, I have chronic Lyme disease. And the stress is like the worst thing for it. So it's been extremely unpleasant for me. But that's not really the point. The point is that enough is enough. Well, it seems like a very clear smear campaign

to paint you as a conspiracy theorist crackpot, as you said. Well, that's a very good point. I was thinking about this. It's kind of a trifecta for me, because first of all, it does accuse me of being a conspiracy theorist. It doesn't use the phrase, but it implies as much. And that's been an active meme.

That phrase was weaponized in 1967 by the CIA. In fact, there's a terrific book on this called Conspiracy Theory in America by Lance Dehaven Smith from the University of Texas Press, which I asked him to write for a series I was editing at the press at the time. And it's still in print, it's still selling. And it's the best study of how that phrase entered

the language and everybody's consciousness. So everybody we know will say at some point, well, I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but. Yeah. And they'll say something perfectly rational. So there's that, which has chilled inquiry into the Kennedy assassinations, into the King assassination, into 9-11, and you name it.

And it's still active today. That's one. Then I'm accused on the grounds of political correctness. I mean, this letter to the dean ends with a ringing declaration of how my colleagues stand with trans people and people of color. And it's like they're all running for office. Yeah.

I mean, you said I think it was in the rebuttal letter, or maybe it was in the lawsuit. You talk about how by declaring their kind of progressive bona fides and then enumerating your multiple kind of crimes against students and academia that they're effectively kind of pathologizing you, like two-fold. They're on the right side of history.

That's right. But before we get into that, what is I'm going to ask you to repeat this again. What is your current status with the university you're teaching? You mentioned that the propaganda class has been shelved for now, and you're teaching two cinema courses. Two sections of the same class, yeah.

That's what I'm scheduled to teach. And I'm on the faculty. You have tenure. You have tenure. They can't easily fire me. Yeah, yeah. I think they would like to. Let me just mention the third prong of the attack on me

is COVID heresy, that I'm making people unsafe. And that's now. And they're Zoom courses. Exactly, my Zoom courses. Now, I mean, I have been, and this may be a key to why this is happening. I've been a very busy, I almost want to say vector, but source of a lot of important information

about COVID and possible remedies and its origins and the dubiousness of these experimental vaccines and the infectiousness of asymptomatic cases and the PCR tests. I mean, these are things everybody should know, but that the media has blacked out. So through my listserv and website, the notorious website, I have made a lot of this stuff

available. And I have found myself suddenly to be a lone academic voice or one of very, very few in the West who readily provides that kind of information and invites other points of view. And I reckon NYU doesn't take kindly to that because they're heavily invested in vaccines and that whole sort of medical industrial complex.

Right. I was going to ask why you think the mask mandate is so prevailing. You mean, why is it so successful? Yeah. Well, people are terrorized. It's really that simple. It is the most successful fear campaign in world history.

You go back to World War I, which was the kind of template for modern propaganda practice, and look at how successfully Britain and the US demonized Germany, the Hun, by ascribing the most grotesque crimes to the troops in Belgium, the rape of Belgium, impaling babies on bayonets, cutting off the breasts of nurses, crucifying a Canadian soldier. Now, the Germans were pretty ruthless

as they marched through Belgium. I mean, they were also responding to sniper fire. So they would take excessive reprisals, but they never committed a single one of the crimes that caught everybody's imagination. But it's hard to convey how successfully they inflamed mass opinion and filled people with fear and anger to the point that they would enlist

in a war whose real purpose they would never have supported or even understood. And that was a kind of masterpiece. And interestingly, in that case, within a year or so after the war ended, the truth about all this started leaking out as even some of the propagandists themselves wrote tell-alls for popular magazines. And by the mid-20s, everybody knew

that they'd been completely fooled. So that was the beginning of a really kind of a healthy period in Western, well, in American and British history, where mass opinion was fairly and justifiably cynical about government claims. And that lasted through the 30s. And if it was exacerbated by the Depression, because here we were promised a paradise on Earth

through capitalism, there's no way like the American way. And everybody was on bread lines, right? But that all stopped with World War II. The point is that the fear of the bestial enemy then carried over to the fear of the Reds, right? The Communists. It was the Communist menace. And that was a little vaguer than just one country, Germany,

or the Axis powers. They could be anywhere. Your postman could be a communist, right? Then they took it a little further with the war on terrorism, which is even vaguer than the Reds, because it's sort of a, what is it? It's almost an abstraction. And that entails fear of Muslims and, you know.

Well, that's because they had to justify the military, industrial, complex, nuclear proliferation of that. Of course, of course. But see this, this represents an absolutely brilliant refinement of the method. You know, the method being make the enemy increasingly more inchoate and omnipresent.

Now it's the virus, the virus. Think about that. It's the perfect enemy you get to absolve yourself of any kind of accusations, or most of the accusations like racism, or xenophobia, or whatever, just particles in the air, like that sort of thing. Do you see any irony in the fact that you teach a course in propaganda, and are now kind of accused of what people

might describe as propagandizing against the official propaganda system? Well, the question kind of answers itself, doesn't it? Yeah, it's ironic. Yeah, did it strike? I mean, did it strike you? Was that something that like immediately, you know, I think it would be amusing for me, you know?

Yeah, I guess there was a sardonic chuckle or two. Well, that's the conspiracy theorists, sort of why the smear campaign is so effective, is because, and now post-COVID, right, it's like the alt-right line of thinking, is that the virus isn't real, any COVID skepticism is tantamount to neo-fascist sentiment, basically. Yeah, that's right.

Talk about irony. We are now living in the darkening shadow of a totalitarianism, the likes of which the world has never seen, and it's happening in the name of anti-fascism. You know, Trump has played a crucial role in this, you know, probably unwittingly, because I don't think he's the sharpest tool in the box. I think he's played into their hand, yeah.

Yeah, because everybody has long since, not everybody, but liberals, progressives, have long since bought the equation of Trump, Hitler. I think Trump is Hitler, which is ridiculous, if you know anything about either one of them. Trump is Hitler, and therefore, anyone who says anything that sounds like something he would say is like a proud boy, is a supporter of his, is a fascist.

I've had friends, some of the smartest people I know, I've known them for years and years. One guy, in particular, whose work I've promoted, worked closely with him in the election integrity movement, responded to something I sent my listserv, which was about the lockdowns, you know, and didn't even read what I sent. He just read my little preface and said,

how does it feel to be on the same side as the AK-47, or worse, toting thugs who he goes off on this tirade? This was insane. I ask myself this question all the time. Yeah. Yeah, right. I get up every morning. Yeah, it feels, nah, it doesn't feel that good.

Oh, well. No, no, I mean, but that's, you know, honestly, this is useful because propaganda appeals to the lizard brain. It doesn't matter how smart you are or how well educated. If your buttons have been pushed successfully, if you're sufficiently terrorized, if you're in a panic. If you're living in constant fear of a virus.

Constant fear of a virus, and you see Trump as a virus. You know how Trump is, this presidential virus. First of all, you're going to want to believe what the authorities you trust tell you. See, that's why these terror campaigns are so bad for democracies. They make people comply. So people trust Dr. Fauci,

which if they knew anything about his background, they would never do. They trust Bill Gates, which is mind boggling to me, you know? Yeah. And they will follow everything he says, even if it differs from what he'd said a month ago, you know, they'll just say, oh, yes, we have to listen to him because he's not Trump and he disagrees with the Trump.

Well, the Fauci worship, the Fauci t-shirts, the Cuomo sexuals, the like. I don't know why we haven't gotten into the Fauci merch game, really. I was just going down, actually, because I couldn't sleep last night and I went down like a kind of oral history of AIDS. And, you know, I said this on the pod before,

but Larry Kramer famously said, you know, Fauci shouldn't be honored at a dinner. He should be thrown in prison for his bungling of the AIDS virus. And you see how like with the AIDS virus, they were making many of them same mistakes that we're making now. And I think the bigger issue, right,

is that people have a very short historic memory, which is probably flattened even more so because of the internet and social media. But to that point, I noticed, and I was Googling you, that you wrote an introduction to Edward Bernays' propaganda. I did. And we now know that, you know, guys like Bernays and his contemporary Walter Lipman

were the kind of original architects of public opinion management. I'm curious how you think propaganda has changed since then and then since like Noam Chomsky published Manufacturing Consent. And Noam Chomsky, who has now become himself a kind of avid propagandist of, yeah, that's kind of a sad story.

Well, how has it changed? It has changed in its vastly greater sophistication and in the fact that it has benefited from the real sort of study, the sort of scientific study of psychological manipulation that was carried out, not just by the CIA. I mean, MKUltra, all those programs were really mind control programs.

But prior to their work, the Nazis had engaged in this kind of study under Dr. Goebbels. And a lot of those guys were brought over here, you know, as part of Operation Paperclip. And, you know, those who didn't go to work at NASA or the Pentagon would often go to work in universities and stuff on psychological warfare and that kind of thing. So it has changed in that it's become more sophisticated.

And the technological apparatus on which it's based, I think is even more hypnotic and arresting than previous media, you know, so we're all online. I mean, the internet on the one hand is a great resource, or I should say has been a great resource for those interested in counter narratives. I've been saying this for years, that younger people who are used to the internet

are not as reverent towards the New York Times and not as freaked out by the conspiracy theory meme. And are more receptive because for a couple of decades now, the other side of the story has been available just to click away. Even as we speak, that's changing because so much stuff is being deleted and blocked, flagged as false.

And Google has, and Facebook, et cetera, have a great deal to do with this, you know. So as the internet has become more and more enthralled to a few private companies, we see the internet go the way of the previous media, which already were excessively dominated by like six multinationals. So all that has meant that it's changed since Bernays' day,

but it is fundamentally the same. And what I have discovered to my horror all this year is that, generally speaking, humankind has not progressed one centimeter since the days when people flocked to the recruiting stations to go fight the Han, there's no difference. And indeed, you know, Chomsky made this very good point in the 60s, you know, when he was really lucid,

that it's often the most educated people who are the most susceptible to propaganda. You know, you'd think it'd be different. This isn't to say that the uneducated aren't susceptible, they are, but a certain kind of establishment narrative is more compelling to people who've been to university, and especially if they have advanced degrees, you know, because- Well, they're invested in the system.

They're invested in the system. And also, I want to tell you about a book. I'm in the middle of it now. It's really a terrific book. Yeah, give us your bibliography. Sure, it's called Disciplined Minds by a guy named Jeff Schmidt. He got a PhD in physics, but it's more of a sociological discussion of why, how the professions, all of them,

the law, medicine, academia, the media, how they all shape the people who join them, mainly through the process of professional training. People go into these fields, idealistically, with high expectations for what they can accomplish, and that has to be kind of slowly battered out of you so that you end up posing no threat to the system, you know, raising no serious questions

about the status quo or the power structure. And that's why people can work for the times and the networks and the rest of them and see things in a certain way and have that conspiracy theory reflex really primed, you know? Right, yeah. Well, because it would, sorry. Well, because it would call into question

all of the structures of reality that they prop themselves up on and are invested in. Exactly, that's right. I mean, they're invested both financially and psychologically. What do you think is the more important motivation, the financial or the psychological one, like the securing the bag or maintaining your defense mechanism?

That's something that I think about a lot. Well, I think it's impossible to separate the two. They're intimately connected, you know? You can't face yourself making the fairly decent salary you make if you don't believe in what you're doing. I mean, if you tried to do that, self-loathing would be sort of overwhelming, you know? I've, Upton Sinclair said something like this.

Upton Sinclair said black lives matter. He said build back better. But I think Lipman made this point regarding journalists that they're actually way more gullible than the general public. I mean, we had Matt Taibian a couple of weeks ago, and one of the revelations in his book, HINC, was that the kind of joint

U.S.-British intelligence ghouls who were orchestrating the war on terror and the first launch into kind of Iraq expected the public to fall in line way quicker than the professional media, and it turned out that it was actually the other way around. Right. And there were, you know, public protests everywhere

because nobody kind of in the general public bought the WMD narrative. That's right. Yeah, so that, I mean, that was an interesting, but, you know, it's interesting that they didn't see that, but people kind of a generation to generations before that absolutely clocked it. But that's true.

Those were the biggest protests up to that point in world history, actually. They swept the globe, and if you go back and look at the Times's coverage, it's very interesting to see that they almost don't mention the protests in this country. They talk about them elsewhere, you know. Yeah, journalists, I mean, the relations

between the CIA and journalism are really worth studying. We look at that in my propaganda course. Yeah. You know, they've been working on journalists in America since their formation in 1947, but the relations between the power players and the press predate that development, you know, because the press was largely owned by

predatory players, you know, the newspapers, most of the magazines, and the press was dominated by its big advertisers. So, for example, I mean, we all know about the dangers of smoking, but for decades, the press ignored that because they were so dependent on revenues from that industry. And prior to that, America's first drug crisis was in the late 19th century because so many of the patent

medicines, you know, these snake oil cures that people bought over the counter for all kinds of ailments were laced with morphine or cocaine or alcohol. Some of them were downright toxic and many were addictive. And the press was mute on this because that industry was, I think, probably their primary source of revenue for decades, stuff really sold. John Deet Rockefeller's dad was a patent medicine salesman

out West, you know, this kind of runs in the family. Yeah, so the press has always been, I mean, if you go back and read Lost Illusions by Balzac, you know, you can already see what the journalists are like, you know, they're very cynical and not the idealists that we see on the screen when we watch all the president's men and stuff like that. But nevertheless, there was still a kind of stubborn core

of serious journalists working even in mainstream media, certainly in the 70s and 80s, and you can sort of track how they were driven out in various ways by looking at individual life stories, that the press has been slowly molded. So by the time of the invasion of Iraq, it was just a propaganda chorus, you know. And I remember the first Gulf War in 91,

that, you know, they're all wearing flags on TV newscasts and it was like state media, you know, right? Well, I think what is so striking about the contemporary propaganda mechanism, as opposed to like in Bernays' time, is the notion of dissenting ideas as being dangerous. Right. And that's really why I think it is so successful.

Well, yes, no. And what sort of is what happened, is happening with you at NYU. Well, that's certainly true. I mean, let's give Bernays some credit. No doubt, of course. No, no, he lived like three blocks away. You know, he was in the Washington Square Muse

and died not that long ago. He lived to be a very ripe old age, as a lot to say about him. But he was more interested, I was mainly interested in selling products and not through advertising, which he held in low esteem. Mm-hmm. He believed in creating an entire frame of mind,

you know, famously sold this line of pianos with a campaign that had nothing to do with pianos on the face of it. It was, he created a craze for music rooms, okay, by working with architectural magazines and getting journalists to do profiles of celebrities with music rooms. So everybody had to have a music room, and when then when you had a music room,

you had to put something in the music room. So it's just really smart, you know. Piano takes up a lot of space. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So that's kind of, I mean, he did work with the CIA on their coup in Guatemala, which not many people know. So he was involved in that kind of thing.

But what you're talking about, the demonization of dissidents as posing a threat to us, this does come straight out of the fear tactics used by war propagandists in particular. And along these lines, it's relevant to recall and exchange that Hermann Göring had with an army psychiatrist named Gustav Gilbert during the Nuremberg trials. The Gilbert was over there interviewing all the defendants

in that trial, and then published a book about it called Nuremberg Diary. And in his chapter on Göring, he tells the story of, it recounts this moment when Göring said, you know, nobody wants war anywhere. And they even Germany, they don't want war. People don't. He said, what does some poor slob on a farm

have to get out of a war, you know? So what the government has to do is convince them that they're under attack and cast anyone who disagrees, any pacifists, for example, as posing a serious threat to their survival. That's all you have to do. He says, it works the same in any country. So Gilbert, being a good American, sort of objects to this

and says, well, in the United States, you know, we have a Republican form of government and, you know, we deliberate debate, blah, blah, blah. And Göring, yeah, no, he said, it can be a democracy. It can be a monarchy. It can be communist. It can be whatever you want. It doesn't make any difference, okay?

He just convinced people that they're under attack and that people who disagree are dangerous and you've got your war, okay? Right, yeah. Well, my question to you is how, I mean, how convinced are people? It seems that lately, and maybe this was always the case, that people are not so much convinced as kind of morally fatigued and checked out.

It seems like this whole kind of propaganda cloud exists outside of like the day-to-day interests and comings and goings of ordinary people who are possibly, of course, swayed by it, but are generally disinterested. Well, the thing about it is that propaganda works on such a deep level. It really bypasses the frontal lobes entirely

and works, it's almost like a kind of neural effect, you know? It gets you at a much deeper level than that. So even if you are tuned out, I think it's extremely difficult to escape the vibe that it's creating. I mean, you could never read The Times or watch TV, just go out on the street. You know, propagandese, that is those who are propagandized,

are themselves vectors of propaganda. So if you're out on the street and everybody's got a mask on and you don't, and they jump off the sidewalk at your approach and all the stores tell you, you got to wear a mask, that's part of it. And you will feel that. It's impossible to escape. Right.

So you're saying propaganda is the real pandemic? Yes, I would actually. That's well put. I would say precisely that. Can I ask you a question about your case on that note? So in the letter that you wrote addressing your colleagues, you described their letter to the dean as false and malicious and characterized their allegations as a pack of lies.

I'm curious, obviously, a lot of the allegations, the Sandy Hook denial, the transgender eugenics comment sound completely kind of crazy. Well, Sandy Hook is like a dog whistle for- Yeah. Conspiracy theorist meme, basically. It's invoked to discredit you. Yeah, exactly.

But my question is, what would compel them to fabricate such claims? And is there some plausible reason, like a miscommunication or a delusion on their part that would compel them to do so? In other words, do you have a sense if you're at liberty to talk about this, what their true interests or motives are in all of this? Yeah, I can definitely answer that. It really all comes down to something that happened before this. This move against me is actually the third this year.

And the first one is the one I'm going to tell you about. I think in February, I was summoned, I got an email from a lawyer at the Office of Equal Opportunity at NYU telling me that my conduct had come under scrutiny and they wanted me to come in and answer questions. And I had no idea what this could possibly be about. Like, had I come on to a student? You know, had I used the N word?

I mean, so I wrote back and I said, well, what conduct? He said, some of your comments about gender identity or something like that. All right. So, I mean, I don't really teach that stuff. So I, let me put that differently. I don't really teach that subject, you know. So I, you know, hired a law firm to advise me. It cost me more than I had and I went in for my interrogation

and it turned out that a colleague who signed this recent letter had reported me to them sending them three of my online writings on transgenderism. I stress the last syllable because I mean transgender ideology. A four paragraph thing I'd sent my listserv and it was on my website. And then two facetious Facebook posts, these three things online, nothing to do with my teaching. And she's neither on my list nor is she a Facebook friend.

So I asked, well, how did she even get these? And he said, well, another colleague gave them to her. So I don't know who that was. All right. So they questioned me and I answered their questions fully and in detail. I explained that I have nothing whatsoever against any transgender persons I never have. And I mentioned to them that, you know, we had recently hired somebody to teach transgender theory in the department.

They is this person's preferred pronoun. They had given what I thought to be the best talk of the three talks. And I was pleased they were coming and I emailed them and I said, welcome. I'm glad you're going to be with us. We had a nice exchange. I recommended a book that was relevant to their, you know, dissertation. Okay. I mentioned that.

And then I explained my critique of transgender ideology that the piece I'd written from my list was occasioned by a sprite commercial featuring a mother breastbinding her daughter. Okay. Coca-Cola owned sprite. Why would Coca-Cola, you know, one of the world's worst corporate felons be doing a commercial like this to sell a soft drink, right? And Starbucks too pushing this. It's not because there's so many trans customers, you know, it's something else.

So I talked about something I've discussed elsewhere often, which is the possibility that the reason why transgender medicine has so much elite support. I mean, it has funding from Warren Buffett and George Soros and people like this with heavy investments in the medical industrial complex because these treatments are extremely profitable surgeries and hormone therapies or they make a lot of money. So that the elite support for transgender activism is not about inclusion and diversity, which I completely support, right? I proposed it was about something else.

I explained this to the lawyers, okay, cut to the chase. But to answer your question, that's the germ, so to speak, of the whole case against me as a bigot, okay, is that episode because they were incensed that what happened was the lawyers who were supposed to take a week to decide whether to proceed with my case emailed me the next morning and said, we're not proceeding, we're dropping this because there were no grounds for any action against me and they saw that and this netled my colleagues. So that if you read their letter to the dean, you can sort of see that that episode is the foundation for everything else they imagined, okay?

I said, I did use the phrase pack of lies in my rebuttal, but I also said, or delusions. I mean, I think they convinced themselves that, yeah, he hates people, he hates trans people and he has attacked them and mocked and ridiculed them on his website, which I've never done, I've never done it anywhere, right? And then the thing about Sandy Hook that I denied Sandy Hook on my website, Sandy Hook doesn't come up on my website, I've never written anything about it. You know, it came up in a couple of classes because there were discussions of school shootings, okay, I've had, see, I have students give group reports and they get to pick a subject and so

some were interested in school shootings and how they've been covered. Right. And in the course of discussion, I think this has happened twice. I said, you know, Sandy Hook was the first one. I mean, Columbine was early, then there was Sandy Hook and that kicked off a series of these high-profile events. And I have to say, if you're interested in this, you should look at that. Right.

That's my Sandy Hook denial. You invited your students to draw their own conclusions. Yeah, shame on me, right? But that's, see, so in their letter to the dean, they must have written this in a frenzy of malicious speculation that they wanted to think that I do that all the time. And so they said it was on my website, but it's not, you know. So that, I hope that answers your question. That's sort of the nugget of, I can't say truth so much, but that's sort of the

quasi-factual basis of their whole. Yeah, I mean, I'm interested in general in how kind of these kind of nascent allegations, mushroom or snowball, and become something that's like supposedly factually like ascertainable or something like that. Right, right. Because it seems, it's hard for me to believe that people, you know, actively sit down and conspire against other people, you know, I'm very naive in that way. It's like lizard brain stuff.

And like you were saying about professionals being even more susceptible to propaganda or ideology, it's because it calls into question their worldview. Yeah, that's right. That sustains their, yeah, their defense mechanisms, their egos, whatever. Yeah, exactly. And they are, you know, avid readers of the times and they listen to NPR and I've heard them talking about Russiagate and they completely buy that, you know, and Trump is the devil and you know, I don't say anything, I don't speak up.

I mean, this is when we had in-person meetings. Right, but returning to COVID compliance, I guess who do you suspect stands to benefit from the war on COVID? Well, I mean, obviously big pharma and big tech, you know, the whole push to get us all to live online benefits big tech immensely and also benefits online retail, which is to say Jeff Bezos, as well as the huge warehouse chains, right? Right, what we're witnessing is the controlled demolition of the independent American economy, the destruction of small businesses, which will then be snapped up for pennies on the dollar

by these mighty players, same with farms. Okay, Monsanto and Cargill, Tyson, these entities are buying up all these farms, right? So there's a huge financial benefit to be gained from all this, but then it shades into something else, okay? It's not just that they want all the money, which they do, they want all the money, but they also want all the power, okay? That's why they're moving against all dissent, right? That's why they're trying to put everybody under the most exquisite surveillance the world has

ever known, which is another benefit of living online, because everything you do, all your interactions are transparent. So it's, you know, I don't want to sound, I don't want to sound this dystopian a note, but this is what I see happening, which compels us to find ways to resist it. I don't think it's a fate to complete. And I think depending on where you live, your view of its success will vary, where there are really spirited and numerous protests, as in, you know, France now and Germany and Spain and Britain.

You mean against COVID regulations, lockdown measures? Yeah, all of it, right. Well, let me ask you this. So all this happened because a student took to Twitter to try to get you fired. We've seen an increase recently probably due to people being kind of cooped up, because of COVID and the consolidation of the tech platforms of these kind of like cancel campaigns, being successful, people successfully leveraging social media to pressure institutional administrators to take action against their employees on high and low levels.

On top of that, there's this parallel phenomenon of the tech companies actively censoring now in full view of everybody, which didn't exist as blatantly before, not to mention all the data harvesting surveillance, working with the intelligence agency stuff. Do you think that there is any way to pose a credible challenge to the monopoly power of tech companies? Well, that's a really tough question. I mean, and that relates to the larger question of how is it possible to resist the onset of the so-called great reset, which I think is what's in the works here, right?

That's the program. That has to be resisted. And that can only be resisted if a sufficient number of people just refuse to comply. I do think that we're going to have to move back to the era of Samizdat, which is, that's when they mimeographed protests on paper and passed them hand to hand. I think we're going to- Podcasting. Well, podcasting, exactly.

Well, podcasters are being heralded as the new spreaders of the tech industry. They're being heralded as the new spreaders of disinformation who ought to be censored. Definitely you are. But the internet is a huge entity, which is very difficult to police completely without shutting off access to the propaganda. I'm sure they're working on that. You know, China has been the model for the West in this regard because China has a huge police force dedicated to online surveillance that monitors online expression and they will

punish people for dissidents that's in their eyes extreme and they make no bones about it. And everybody in China knows it of tons of Chinese students and it's a fact of life. They understand the nature of their state. Americans are slower, people in the West are slower to grasp this because they think that they have traditions of free expression and so on and that the powers that be are inhibited from cracking down to that extent, but it's getting more and more like that here. Well, people themselves are begging for it. People are themselves calling for censorship on the grounds of

yeah, dissident information being dangerous or neo-fascist or things like that. Well, yeah, and it's especially the so-called left that's the most vocal. I have to say this. I mean, I don't recognize the left. I mean, we've said it. Right. Well, I agree with you completely. I mean, I've always been left in as much as I'm anti-war.

I am very keen to see the plutocrats taken down and their power broken, corporate power cut back radically. And I could go on in that vein, I believe in civil rights, et cetera. I'm staunchly left in that regard, but this left is not, I don't see how it's left at all unless you're thinking of China or North Korea. You're talking about a Stalinist sort of command economy. oligarchical collectivism is what Goldstein calls it in 1984. That's your idea of left, then this is the left.

But they're like the Red Guards. They're militant, woke ideology. As you note, they're insistence on censorship. They're extreme intolerance of disagreement. So that the student who attacked me is a perfect example, as are the colleagues who signed that letter. Right. It's very Soviet.

The policing of your neighbors, peers, colleagues. In my mind, it should always be a red flag when the aims of progressive activists align with the interests of multinational corporations. Progressing towards why. You are so right. And it's not like people fixate a lot on the role of the left within the political compass, but I think that their bigger and more dangerous role is in acting as the foot soldiers of tech companies.

And that's, I think, by far the scariest challenge that we face. I've said this before too in the podcast, Amazon is effectively our centrally planned economy. You know, if you have some kind of actual socialism in America, it's just not the one that people think. Well, the thing that people need to understand, and this includes all my Marxist friends, is that Wall Street and the city of London were a major influence on the Russian revolution. Andrew Carnegie called himself a socialist. People don't know this.

He was, yeah, he called himself a socialist. They like that model because it means complete control of the market, and no competition. You know, so they wouldn't particularly like the rhetoric about wealth redistribution and, you know, so on. But they had no problem with the Bolshevik approach. And that's why they essentially funded it. I mean, there's several books on this. So people have this romantic view that the Bolsheviks prevailed because they had mass support

in Russia, which they did not. There was a kind of intelligence operation, and they depended on funds for their industrialization, funds from the West, for various reasons. It suited the players over here to help them out, just as it suited them to help out the Nazis. You know, this is all a really interesting subject. I mean, we could even extend it to Japan, imperial Japan and U.S. involvement in that. But we're always very easily distracted by these little dramas of one side versus the other, and that extends, of course, to the charade of our presidential contests and the two parties,

you know, ostensible opposition to each other when they're actually working in concert, right? So, I mean, one way for people to resist is to come to terms with the fact that these are side shows, you know, that left, right, that is completely irrelevant now. It doesn't matter, you know, the street theater of white supremacists battling Antifa and BLM. You know, all three of them are shot through with cops, you know, agents. It's theater. We saw this kind of thing. And it's worth noting that COVID regulations seem to have changed for Black Lives Matter protests. The transmission rates somehow became lower.

They don't catch COVID, right? Unless a white racist gives it to them, then, you know, no, it's completely absurd. But it's not left versus right. It's the elites versus all the rest of us, you know. And to your point about the danger of the left becoming foot soldiers for a corporate agenda, you know, to the extent that they are now avidly pro-lockdown, right? Amy Goodman, I think Chomsky. I've never heard him utter a peep of protest against it. All the rest of them, you know, they're all, you know, they believe in masking. They want everybody to have equal access to the vaccines, you know.

Someday, if we all survive this, you know, we will look back and see that these left stars and their followers were all good Germans, basically, that they kept harping on the danger of fascism posed by Trump, right? As if, what, the Proud Boys are going to take over the military? It's just so ludicrous, you know. But it is, again, based on severe historical amnesia or ignorance of history, you know. And I've always seen it as my mission in teaching the propaganda course, and even to some extent the film courses, to provide a little bit of that missing history. You know, I added a series called The Forbidden Bookshelf, which is a series of e-books, important works that have slipped out

of print, and many of them were killed at birth. There are 27 of them. The Open Road Media publishes them. They finally stopped accepting more titles because it didn't sell enough to justify it. But there's some terrific titles there, and people need to know what's happened in the past. They need to know the history of the CIA, you know. They need to know the history of U.S. involvement with these other seemingly antagonistic powers. They need to know the history of eugenics. They need to know all this, you know, Rockefeller medicine, the history of vaccines. They need to know all this. And you can't know it if any teacher or journalist who tries to tell you about it is defamed and fired, right? That's the perception that motivates my lawsuit.

Well, that's, yeah, the libel suit. I guess I have a question about the efficacy of it, because it seems like the real trial that your colleagues are attempting to have is in public opinion and smearing you as a conspiracy theorist already accomplishes their goals. Well, but see, I think they were taken aback by my lawsuit and by my going public with it, yeah, because it is precisely in the court of public opinion that they have no juice whatsoever and are not comfortable dealing with an audience outside the institution. They have defamed me within the institution as an attempt to get rid of me and, you know, replace me with someone like themselves, no doubt. But I, you know, people basically, it's going to sound really naive,

but I think fundamentally people have common sense. It just takes a plurality of hysterics or zealots to hijack an entire society. And when that happens, the people with common sense are muted by fear and embarrassment. But I, you know, our perspective depends to a great extent on our living in New York City, which is very provincial in a way. You know, I have no use for Trump. I think he's horrendous and I wouldn't trust him as far as I can throw him. I mean, I've actually read books about Trump. I know his history. I certainly don't think he's up against the deep state and that's a fantasy, you know, but I think that there is no question that he won overwhelmingly in this election. I mean, election theft is something I've studied,

I've written books on. The evidence of theft in this election is far more abundant and specific than the evidence of theft in 2004 and 2000. And that was already impressive. So I actually think Trump won handily. And that tells me not that that means the vast majority of the American electorate are neo-Nazis. Or that they even love Trump. Right. They even love Trump. I think they don't like lockdown. They don't like national mask mandates. They find the agenda of the Democratic Party to be alien and threatening just as the Republican's agenda in 2000 and 2004, with its Christianist overtones, that was a minority view. So they had to steal elections, you know, in order to come to power. This time, it's the Democrats who've had to steal

the election to come to power. And it's true that the Trump electorate, the people who voted for Trump, don't necessarily love Trump. Right. They're voting against something rather than for it. And that I consider a hopeful sign, even though I fear that this is all going to be steered in the direction of some kind of civil war. You know, I hear Trump called for millions to mass on Washington on January 6th. That is a horrible idea. Okay. I completely understand why people who voted for him and have ample grounds for believing that it was rigged would be furious and want to protest. I get that. I wish the Democrats had done this 16 years ago. That's what I believe. But I think that any kind of rash, violent response is only going to make

things worse. I mean, the last thing we need is division, right? Well, the street theater that you see happening in places like Portland does have real violent consequences. Yeah. It does. And yeah, I'm reminded. I was thinking like, well, people now won't enlist in a war, but in light of what you just said, it does seem that they would enlist in sort of a de facto war. Yeah, they would. And speaking of war, we've seen that the old Russiagate meme has been hauled out again because now we're being told that Russia was involved in the election, as well as Venezuela and China and Iran, as if the players in the election stealing game in this country have needed any foreign help. Anyway.

I feel a little bit less crazy to hear you say that because I've intimated on this podcast before that maybe the election is not so cut and dry. And of course, every time people get mad and accuse me of being a crackpot and pandering to the right for money or whatever. But it just doesn't seem just intuitively. And I don't have the data. And frankly, the data's confusing. And I think that's how the right that's how it works. But the moral fatigue. Yeah. But I don't just intuitively feel that people would turn out in droves for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris Kamala. Sorry, it feels implausible. Well, yeah. No kidding. She was she was the least popular of the candidates in the primaries, the first to drop out. I mean, I'm sure she has a lot of black support,

but no black person I know can stand her. And he is, you know, a shell of a man. I mean, he's just like the walking dead. And, you know, Martha Raditz. I forget. CNN or PBS. You know, during the campaign, took a cross country drive, take the pulse of the people and saw no Biden lawn signs at all. And, you know, tons of Trump signs everywhere, which she admitted kind of in a whisper on this broadcast. There's just no reason to believe that he has any serious support. I saw a Trump sign on the FDR, like a big flag, and I was frankly stunned by it because here I expect like Biden signs. Right. But they were letting their freak flag fly. Yeah, I guess so. Well, the voting industrial complex also all of the I was I went to Bloomingdale's like the day

after the election. And there was still they still had all like the vote garb up. And I was like, well, that's all just going to go on like a landfill. That's right. Yeah. Yeah, voting that yes, please. I mean, I banged my head against that wall for many years as part of that movement to try to alert people to the need to radically reform the American voting system, you know, which is the worst in the developed world. I mean, that's the verdict of Harvard and the University of Sydney do it. I think a quadrennial overview of voting systems. And ours is 26th out of 26. It's just a joke. Interestingly, Jimmy Carter said, I think in 2007 or 2008, that Venezuela had the best voting system in the world, you know, it's actually exemplary.

So that so much for the Trump team's claims that, you know, Chavez somehow pulled this off. It's so stupid. Do you have any other questions, Anna? Yeah, I have I have a last question. Well, first, I mean, first of all, off topic and back to the mundane specifics of the case, I thought it was really interesting that one of the accusations leave it against you was that you publicly that you publicized the students contact information and identity, the person who came after you. And that struck me as immediately implausible because she went after she took to Twitter using a handle that displayed her full name. So I'm a little confused as to why that came about, where it came from, what's going on with that.

Well, your guess is as good as mine. As I pointed out my rebuttal, that's a complete inversion of the truth. I never named her publicized her contact information. I didn't have to. As you say, she did it on Twitter. She attacked me in a very public way and thereby invited pushback. They accused me of having attacked her and then persisting in naming her all over the place and encouraging people to cyber bully her. This is insane. It's just like their claim that I attacked them. They said my petition is an attack on the department. It's not. I only talk about NYU. I don't even mention the department. But see, interestingly, this is like a teaching moment, this kind of projectivity. You accuse somebody of doing what

you're doing or what you plan to do. On the one hand, that's a very old propaganda tactic. You do that. You do that. I mean, LBJ did it to Goldwater. He charged him with being a warmonger. All the while, they were planning to radically expand the war in Vietnam. Right? But there was the Daisy commercial and he's going to drop the bomb and all this stuff. That's a tactic. At the same time, it's also a symptom of a kind of paranoid narcissism. We've all been involved with people like this who accuse you of doing what they're doing. Right. It's very disorienting. It's a form of gaslight.

Yeah. I accused Dasha of being late all the time. Right. Well, there you go. But I think that my colleagues doing it falls into the lead. I don't see them as sly, conscious propagandists. Yeah. We saw the Biden campaign doing this to the Trump campaign, throwing a litany of accusations against him that they then went on to... They were going to steal the election. Exactly. They're going to steal it. I guess I have two last questions. The first one is, do you feel like it's kind of a fool's errand

when you do like a searching moral inventory of being like a champion for truth and justice from within the academic institutional complex? Well, no, because first of all, where else am I going to do it? Well, right. Yeah. If I were a journalist, I would be eking out a living doing a podcast because there are no outlets that pay that I could write for. Right. But the real answer to your question is that I see my teaching as a really important

activity. And it sounds like romantic to put it this way, but it's a means of resistance. There is no way forward if young people don't become exposed to those sides of the story that the powers that be are rigorously blacking out. It's not enough to just tell people this. I don't just say, oh, this is true and that's true. I never say that. I say so often that your eyes could cross. I say, don't believe a single word I say. Okay. If I tell you something that you find shocking and you don't want to believe it, go research it. Okay. Please. And if I'm wrong, will you please tell me and I'll correct it? Yeah.

But I'm here to set an example for the kind of inquiry you should undertake. I'm not here to tell you what's true. Right. You can do that in a university or it should be able to. And tenure is supposed to be there to protect people like me. Okay. It's kind of wasted on people who don't threaten anything. Right. That's a good point. And I guess my last question would be like, do you think mass democracy is possible in an age of mass media or is it contradictory? That's a really good question. I mean,

if the media is allowed to consolidate as it has been and if it's commercial and privately owned and people don't have access to any other means of information, then democracy is not possible. And I, you know, before throwing myself into the election integrity struggle in early in the century, for about eight years prior, I was, I'd thrown myself into the struggle against media concentration, very active in this, you know, published stuff on it, spoke about it, talked to people, the FTC about it, you know, possibility of antitrust measures. This was just around the time of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which made things really much worse, you know, which had bipartisan support.

So I guess I was acting on the basis of your point, right, that we can't have a democracy in a media atmosphere just heavily polluted by these giant propaganda outlets. So yeah, the study of propaganda is essential to the survival of democracy. That's the way I would answer this. Well said. Well, thank you so much for coming on our podcast. We wish you the best of luck with you. Well, maybe we could do a follow-up in six months if we're not in internment camps. You can keep us posted. Okay. We'll see you in hell. See you in hell.